


Regeneration

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Accidental Pregnancy, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Exes, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Kind of an unhealthy relationship but they're working on it, Non-Linear Narrative, Open ended
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:47:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22676620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: She should have known it wouldn’t work.Not wanting to tell her friends because she knew she’d have gotten ayou can’t be friends with benefits with your extalk should have told her all she needed to know.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey
Comments: 24
Kudos: 274
Collections: For one is both and both are one in love: The Reylo Fanfiction Anthology's Valentine's Day Exchange





	Regeneration

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bitterbones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bitterbones/gifts).



> For Annie--tried to merge your last two prompts (exes/friends with benefits + optional accidental pregnancy). Hope you enjoy this lil treat!

Rey looks at the pregnancy test and sits down on the ground.

_Shit._

* * *

_Go fuck yourself!_ she’d screamed at the top of her lungs the last time she’d seen him. What else was she supposed to shout though? _Why do you have to understand me so well and understand the world so little? Why do you let your pain dominate you and remind me that my pain dominates me?_

His cum is still dripping out of her. She wishes she hadn’t come as hard as she had but if there was one thing Kylo was good at, it was nailing her so well against a wall she might as well be a painting. He’d growled words into her ears that she only remembers now as she walks through the lamplit streets because she’d been too blissed out to really take them in. _God you’re beautiful._

_I missed you--this._ This, he had tried to correct himself because this was them trying to do friends with benefits. 

She should have known it wouldn’t work.

Not wanting to tell her friends because she knew she’d have gotten a _you can’t be friends with benefits with your ex_ talk should have told her all she needed to know.

* * *

_We need to talk._ She texts him two days later. Two days where she hasn’t been able to eat, or really sleep. The latter is not as abnormal as the former. The former is because her stomach riots every time she looks at food, though whether it’s the hormones flooding her body with new life or the fact that anxiety sends it twisting, she doesn’t know. But she does text him.

**_I thought I could go fuck myself._ **

She almost throws her phone against the wall because of _course_ he’d say that, of course that’d be his reaction. He was trying to get a rise out of her because that’s what he did. He was always trying to get a rise out of her. It was petty, and annoying, and manipulative--except that it was also honest sometimes. Honest because she was always running from the things she was afraid she was and Kylo always looked her straight in the eye and told her what he saw.

And what he saw was always more her than anything anyone else saw.

So she snaps a picture of the positive test and sends it to him.

Let him try _that_ on for size.

* * *

This is a bad idea. She knows it’s a bad idea. 

The whole reason they broke up was that they couldn’t be what they wanted to be to one another. Neither of them knew how to bend without breaking--too brittle, too battle-worn. But not giving anything to one another so they could still have one another--that wasn’t the right compromise. She knew it wasn’t.

But her hands went down his pants anyway, pumping his shaft as he kissed her neck and pushed her back through the door to his apartment while his hands cup her breasts roughly. She’d liked it when he’d fucked her sweet, but she likes it better when he fucks her rough, raw. She’s not delicate, or breakable. He might be. She thinks he’s more prone to breaking than she is. 

But they know each other too well now to feel as though they have to be shy. The second the door is shut she’s unzipping his pants and he’s tugging her shirt up over her head and god there’s something about his hands specifically. His hands which are huge, and rough--which manage to just hold her so perfectly and push her farther than she knows how to push herself.

Is that her growling as he twists her nipples? Or is it him as she tugs his cock out of his pants and swipes her thumb across his tip?

* * *

**_So you getting rid of it?_ **

She had thought he’d call her but the text comes through two minutes later and she calls him, ready to scream again.

“Fuck off,” she snaps at him the moment he picks up. “Fuck _off_.”

“So you really should get rid of it then,” he grits out angrily. “Because if you keep it, you’re going to make it pretty fucking hard for me to fuck off.”

“As if you’re not sitting there thinking that this is the perfect excuse for—” she begins but he cuts her off.

“You left me, remember? You fucking left _me_ , and then came back saying you wanted to keep fucking. And now this? _You’re_ the one who doesn’t know what you want, Rey. Not me. I’ve always wanted you.”

She lets out another yell and suddenly, horribly, too quickly for her to know what she’s even thinking--she’s crying. “Shut up,” she moans into the phone. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

“What do you want, Rey?” he asks her. “Do you want it?”

She wants to hang up. She wants to throttle him. She wants to scream at him _why? Why are you like this? Why can’t you just be everything I want you to be? Why do you have to be_ you _?_

“I wanted Ben’s hand,” she mutters and now it’s his turn to make an annoyed noise in the back of his throat. _This again?_

“Call me whatever the _fuck_ you want,” he says at last. “I don’t care. But want me. Want _me_.”

* * *

The thing she likes about being with Kylo is that when she’s with him, she’s not afraid to say anything at all. She knows that he’ll hold her through her pain, that he’ll support her through her frustration. And yeah--he might _be_ that frustration, but god if he’s not used to handling himself so why shouldn’t he get it when she has trouble with it too?

She’s not alone when she’s with him, even when she’s by herself. She knows he’s out there somewhere, ready to come over and hold her, or cook for her because he hates getting prepackaged stuff from the grocery store and that’s all Rey knows how to cook for herself.

She can’t get rid of this nagging feeling that _this is it._

Which makes it that much harder that he can be an absolute and utter _fuckhead_ sometimes.

* * *

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispers to him. The phone is on the table and he’s sitting on her couch as she paces back and forth. The frantic energy of this pregnancy hasn’t gone away since she took the test, but somehow him actually being there helps. It usually does. Except when it doesn’t. But even when it doesn’t, it still does.

“You do,” he says quietly and she glares at him.

“Fuck—”

“--off, yeah, I get it. But you do know what to do.”

“I don’t know what I want, so how can I—”

He lets out an impatient huff. “You _figure it out_ Rey. Yeah, there’s a timeframe, but that’s what you have to do. If you don’t want it, you act. But you decide even if it’s not right now. Ok?”

She swallows and looks at him. She lets herself think, for just a moment, imagine, dream--her and Kylo and a baby, sitting on a couch, being a family. And then reality catches up on her. Idylls like that don’t exist--especially not in her life. And she’d be a terrible mother. And Kylo isn’t exactly the stuff dream dads are made of.

_But we’d love it. We’d love it more than we were loved._

Maybe that would help.

She imagines life without Kylo, the one she’d tried to make for herself but had failed at because god he was something else, wasn’t he? He was eternally pulling her into her sphere. Or maybe she was eternally turning back to it, unable to let go of that dream, that idyll. Even without a baby, there was nothing like sitting in the curve of his arms, feeling his breath, his heart--his cock when he was fucking her, but really just...just him. Just Kylo. 

She swallows, and sits down next to him. His fingers brush against hers and she feels calmer. 

_I don’t know what I want_ duels with _I want you._

It had never been an _I don’t want you._ It had always been an _I shouldn’t want you._ But the want had always been there. Wanting him, and wanting what he couldn’t give her.

A baby wouldn’t fix that.

He’d hate her for even thinking that it might. Wasn’t he the product of that--thinking a baby would fix it?

“What do you want?” she asks him quietly.

He lets out a long slow breath.

“I want what I’ve always wanted,” he tells her.

She looks at him and she sees the words in his eyes before he says them.

* * *

It’s scary--how clearly Kylo would move the world for her. She’s never had anything like that. She’s never had anyone who wants to be her stability.

She never thought she’d have someone who wants to be her stability and then watch them as they can’t be their own stability. Because she’s not a fool enough to call Kylo stable.

That doesn’t stop her from loving him. And she wonders if both of their instability helps stabilize the other. Getting through it together. Finding balance, peace in those old aches that have existed longer than their own memories.

But it spooks her. It spooks her constantly because she should want to be with someone but what if he leaves her? What if he leaves her right when she’s feeling stable again? Isn’t it better to leave first then? To keep herself from getting hurt?

* * *

“I’ve only ever wanted you,” he says. “Why is that so hard for you to believe?”

She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until she lets it go again at last. 

“I don’t think it is,” she whispers. He shifts next to her and she knows he’s watching her. “I think it’s just scary.”

He swallows. She half-expects anger to be there. _You put me fucking through all this for that?_

But it’s Kylo--Ben--whatever he fucking goes by these days. And he’s better at understanding her than she is at understanding herself so he just pulls her into that safe, warm, sturdy circle of his arms. “I think my body knew it even if my mind didn’t. I think that’s why I wanted to try…”

“Just fucking?”

“Just fucking.”

She takes a breath. Her stomach feels calm for the first time in days. Maybe it was the anxiety more than the hormones that was making her feel sick. 

* * *

They fuck the night they break up. It’s not even one last hurrah. She’s not even sure she can call it a mistake. 

It’s an ending, maybe. An homage. Or maybe just dancing across that fine line between love and hate.

She loves the way he feels when he presses into her; she hates the way her heart beats faster at the touch of his hands. She loves the way her name sounds on his lips; she hates that she keeps moaning his when she’s trying to stop herself from doing that anymore. She loves him. She hates too--hates that this can’t be what she wants it to be, that he is stubborn, and an asshole, and why--why--why does it have to hurt to leave someone too? Why can’t it be painless?

Or is he making sure it hurts as much as it can? That would be like him. If I’m gonna suffer, you’re gonna suffer with me. We’re in this together—

Together. They’re together now, her legs on his shoulders, their breath mingling in the darkness. Both of them are too stubborn to say what she _knows_ they’re both thinking. _Please say it wasn’t the end. Please still want me. Please let me love you._

But instead his thumb strums at her clit until she’s arching and crying out underneath him and when he collapses forward onto her, he rolls off her fast. They don’t get to savor one another and what they’ve done anymore.

It’s over.

* * *

“I don’t know if we should be parents.”

“We got a little time to decide.”

“Yeah.” His hand is on her belly. Her heart is in her throat. “Yeah. We got a little time to decide.”


End file.
